This poem lures you in with profanity gleeful cynicism, but loses steam like a childish rant; by the end we see that blaming all our problems on our progenitors makes self-extinction the only proper solution, taken to its logical extreme. It’s difficult to steer out of the ruts they’ve carved in the road for us. It’s easier to say “I turned out all right,” and hand it down. Or to cop out and not have any kids yourself, perhaps out of fear or spite. Larkin packs a lot into this little poem. Which is what the best poetry can do. Distill an epic saga into a few paragraphs, or the whole history of humanity.

Rachel Hadas, my poetry teacher at Rutgers (and a fine poet in her own right) introduced me to this one. She tolerated my bombastic and colorful poems, written before I had a clear vision of what I was actually trying to say. Thankfully they are buried on a hard drive somewhere, never to see the light of day. One you can read is over at Gerald So’s excellent Crime Poetry site, The 5-2.

It’s called “Just Ice,” and whatever resonance it may have is owed to Gerald’s patience and skill as an editor. Some of the best hardboiled fiction, or minimalism—whatever you want to call the hard-edged grit song that rose from ashes of the Great War through Hammett, Hemingway, Jim Tully, and others—has the ring of poetry, and Gerald writes and curates some fine modern verse that keeps that song alive.

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Thomas Pluck has slung hash, trained in martial arts in America and Japan, worked on the docks, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New Jersey, the birthplace of criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake, but has so far evaded capture. He remains a fugitive with his wife Sarah and their two cats.